Three whalers on a ship talk about whaling, home, heaven and other crew members. Sam is a young rule-follower; Gorey is older and is full of jokes and stupid provocations; and Babben the old sea dog who thinks everyone should just shut up and listen to him. Their dilemma is there is nothing they can do but wait.
Their ship, Dogstar, is stuck in pack ice in the Arctic and has been for a long time. The other people on board are offstage: the captain has gone to his cabin in alcoholic despair and the first mate is dying in his cabin. The rest of the crew are, we find, lying on the ice all around the ship. They were thrown overboard in a burial at sea but, the ship being ice-bound, they are just lying around as a permanent momento mori.
Flashes of the of the shipowner occur in a blaze of light like a divinity, probably a hallucination brought on by scurvy. Their course is set whether or not they see this revelation, it doesn’t change their situation.
Gorey is taking pieces from the deck of the ship to use as firewood. If only they can survive until the ice melts they will go home. Yet even that is not a great prospect when they have been able to kill only one whale and have little to sell. They struck ice because they were chasing a dwindling whale stock which had been over-fished in previous decades. Gorey blames the captain, “He pushed us too far north.”
Against this catastrophe of greed and mismanagement, Babben’s homespun wisdom is pathetic: ‘If you do what you’re supposed to do, if you just get your head down and – it works out for you in the end.’
The actors bring about a gradual realisation of their impending doom with their increasingly fraught interactions. Dogstar feels like Beckett with a bleak humour and a straining after meaning, but is a general meaning there to be uncovered, apart from the obvious ecological one? Maybe we are just being told we have gone too far and we can’t do anything about it. If that is the message, it could be delivered in a funnier package with a bit more dramatic tension.
This is a well-directed play with a fine, simple set which has the chill of the Arctic about it and costumes which makes you shiver to consider the conditions men face dressed like that.
The writer Daisy Hall has form on this: her last play, Bellringers, was about two men in a tower during a violent thunderstorm. She likes putting men in stressful situations where they can’t get out and seeing what they say to each other. She particularly likes people who really can’t stand each other being forced to accommodate. While all three actors did an admirable job, it was hard going with a colourless plot.
Venue: Hampstead Theatre
Playwright: Daisy Hall
Director: Lucy Morrison
Cast: Justin Edwards, Abdul Jalloh, Adam Rojko Vega
Duration: 1 hour 25 minutes no interval
Until: 5 December 2026